Louisa Pallant, by Henry James

II

I called on them the next at their lodgings, the modesty of which was enhanced by a hundred pretty
feminine devices — flowers and photographs and portable knick-knacks and a hired piano and morsels of old brocade flung
over angular sofas. I took them to drive; I met them again at the Kursaal; I arranged that we should dine together,
after the Homburg fashion, at the same table d’hote; and during several days this revived familiar intercourse
continued, imitating intimacy if not quite achieving it. I was pleased, as my companions passed the time for me and the
conditions of our life were soothing — the feeling of summer and shade and music and leisure in the German gardens and
woods, where we strolled and sat and gossiped; to which may be added a vague sociable sense that among people whose
challenge to the curiosity was mainly not irresistible we kept quite to ourselves. We were on the footing of old
friends who still had in regard to each other discoveries to make. We knew each other’s nature but didn’t know each
other’s experience; so that when Mrs. Pallant related to me what she had been “up to,” as I called it, for so many
years, the former knowledge attached a hundred interpretative footnotes — as if I had been editing an author who
presented difficulties — to the interesting page. There was nothing new to me in the fact that I didn’t esteem her, but
there was relief in my finding that this wasn’t necessary at Homburg and that I could like her in spite of it. She
struck me, in the oddest way, as both improved and degenerate; the two processes, in her nature, might have gone on
together. She was battered and world-worn and, spiritually speaking, vulgarised; something fresh had rubbed off her —
it even included the vivacity of her early desire to do the best thing for herself — and something rather stale had
rubbed on. At the same time she betrayed a scepticism, and that was rather becoming, for it had quenched the eagerness
of her prime, the mercenary principle I had so suffered from. She had grown weary and detached, and since she affected
me as more impressed with the evil of the world than with the good, this was a gain; in other words her accretion of
indifference, if not of cynicism, showed a softer surface than that of her old ambitions. Furthermore I had to
recognise that her devotion to her daughter was a kind of religion; she had done the very best possible for Linda.

Linda was curious, Linda was interesting; I’ve seen girls I liked better — charming as this one might be — but have
never seen one who for the hour you were with her (the impression passed somehow when she was out of sight) occupied
you so completely. I can best describe the attention she provoked by saying that she struck you above all things as a
felicitous FINAL product — after the fashion of some plant or some fruit, some waxen orchid or some perfect peach. She
was clearly the result of a process of calculation, a process patiently educative, a pressure exerted, and all
artfully, so that she should reach a high point.

This high point had been the star of her mother’s heaven — it hung before her so unquenchably — and had shed the
only light (in default of a better) that was to shine on the poor lady’s path. It stood her instead of every other
ideal. The very most and the very best — that was what the girl had been led on to achieve; I mean of course, since no
real miracle had been wrought, the most and the best she was capable of. She was as pretty, as graceful, as
intelligent, as well-bred, as well-informed, as well-dressed, as could have been conceived for her; her music, her
singing, her German, her French, her English, her step, her tone, her glance, her manner, everything in her person and
movement, from the shade and twist of her hair to the way you saw her finger-nails were pink when she raised her hand,
had been carried so far that one found one’s self accepting them as the very measure of young grace. I regarded her
thus as a model, yet it was a part of her perfection that she had none of the stiffness of a pattern. If she held the
observation it was because you wondered where and when she would break down; but she never broke down, either in her
French accent or in her role of educated angel.

After Archie had come the ladies were manifestly his greatest resource, and all the world knows why a party of four
is more convenient than a party of three. My nephew had kept me waiting a week, with a serenity all his own; but this
very coolness was a help to harmony — so long, that is, as I didn’t lose my temper with it. I didn’t, for the most
part, because my young man’s unperturbed acceptance of the most various forms of good fortune had more than anything
else the effect of amusing me. I had seen little of him for the last three or four years; I wondered what his impending
majority would have made of him — he didn’t at all carry himself as if the wind of his fortune were rising — and I
watched him with a solicitude that usually ended in a joke. He was a tall fresh-coloured youth, with a candid circular
countenance and a love of cigarettes, horses and boats which had not been sacrificed to more strenuous studies. He was
reassuringly natural, in a supercivilised age, and I soon made up my mind that the formula of his character was in the
clearing of the inward scene by his so preordained lack of imagination. If he was serene this was still further
simplifying. After that I had time to meditate on the line that divides the serene from the inane, the simple from the
silly. He wasn’t clever; the fonder theory quite defied our cultivation, though Mrs. Pallant tried it once or twice;
but on the other hand it struck me his want of wit might be a good defensive weapon. It wasn’t the sort of density that
would let him in, but the sort that would keep him out. By which I don’t mean that he had shortsighted suspicions, but
that on the contrary imagination would never be needed to save him, since she would never put him in danger. He was in
short a well-grown well-washed muscular young American, whose extreme salubrity might have made him pass for conceited.
If he looked pleased with himself it was only because he was pleased with life — as well he might be, with the fortune
that awaited the stroke of his twenty-first year — and his big healthy independent person was an inevitable part of
that. I am bound to add that he was accommodating — for which I was grateful. His habits were active, but he didn’t
insist on my adopting them and he made numerous and generous sacrifices for my society. When I say he made them for
mine I must duly remember that mine and that of Mrs. Pallant and Linda were now very much the same thing. He was
willing to sit and smoke for hours under the trees or, adapting his long legs to the pace of his three companions,
stroll through the nearer woods of the charming little hill-range of the Taunus to those rustic Wirthschaften where
coffee might be drunk under a trellis. Mrs. Pallant took a great interest in him; she made him, with his easy uncle, a
subject of discourse; she pronounced him a delightful specimen, as a young gentleman of his period and country. She
even asked me the sort of “figure” his fortune might really amount to, and professed a rage of envy when I told her
what I supposed it to be. While we were so occupied Archie, on his side, couldn’t do less than converse with Linda, nor
to tell the truth did he betray the least inclination for any different exercise. They strolled away together while
their elders rested; two or three times, in the evening, when the ballroom of the Kursaal was lighted and dance-music
played, they whirled over the smooth floor in a waltz that stirred my memory. Whether it had the same effect on Mrs.
Pallant’s I know not: she held her peace. We had on certain occasions our moments, almost our half-hours, of
unembarrassed silence while our young companions disported themselves. But if at other times her enquiries and comments
were numerous on this article of my ingenuous charge, that might very well have passed for a courteous recognition of
the frequent admiration I expressed for Linda — an admiration that drew from her, I noticed, but scant direct response.
I was struck thus with her reserve when I spoke of her daughter — my remarks produced so little of a maternal flutter.
Her detachment, her air of having no fatuous illusions and not being blinded by prejudice, seemed to me at times to
savour of affectation. Either she answered me with a vague and impatient sigh and changed the subject, or else she said
before doing so: “Oh yes, yes, she’s a very brilliant creature. She ought to be: God knows what I’ve done for her!” The
reader will have noted my fondness, in all cases, for the explanations of things; as an example of which I had my
theory here that she was disappointed in the girl. Where then had her special calculation failed? As she couldn’t
possibly have wished her prettier or more pleasing, the pang must have been for her not having made a successful use of
her gifts. Had she expected her to “land” a prince the day after leaving the schoolroom? There was after all plenty of
time for this, with Linda but two-and-twenty. It didn’t occur to me to wonder if the source of her mother’s tepidity
was that the young lady had not turned out so nice a nature as she had hoped, because in the first place Linda struck
me as perfectly innocent, and because in the second I wasn’t paid, in the French phrase, for supposing Louisa Pallant
much concerned on that score. The last hypothesis I should have invoked was that of private despair at bad moral
symptoms. And in relation to Linda’s nature I had before me the daily spectacle of her manner with my nephew. It was as
charming as it could be without betrayal of a desire to lead him on. She was as familiar as a cousin, but as a distant
one — a cousin who had been brought up to observe degrees. She was so much cleverer than Archie that she couldn’t help
laughing at him, but she didn’t laugh enough to exclude variety, being well aware, no doubt, that a woman’s cleverness
most shines in contrast with a man’s stupidity when she pretends to take that stupidity for her law. Linda Pallant
moreover was not a chatterbox; as she knew the value of many things she knew the value of intervals. There were a good
many in the conversation of these young persons; my nephew’s own speech, to say nothing of his thought, abounding in
comfortable lapses; so that I sometimes wondered how their association was kept at that pitch of continuity of which it
gave the impression. It was friendly enough, evidently, when Archie sat near her — near enough for low murmurs, had
such risen to his lips — and watched her with interested eyes and with freedom not to try too hard to make himself
agreeable. She had always something in hand — a flower in her tapestry to finish, the leaves of a magazine to cut, a
button to sew on her glove (she carried a little work-bag in her pocket and was a person of the daintiest habits), a
pencil to ply ever so neatly in a sketchbook which she rested on her knee. When we were indoors — mainly then at her
mother’s modest rooms — she had always the resource of her piano, of which she was of course a perfect mistress.

These pursuits supported her, they helped her to an assurance under such narrow inspection — I ended by rebuking
Archie for it; I told him he stared the poor girl out of countenance — and she sought further relief in smiling all
over the place. When my young man’s eyes shone at her those of Miss Pallant addressed themselves brightly to the trees
and clouds and other surrounding objects, including her mother and me. Sometimes she broke into a sudden embarrassed
happy pointless laugh. When she wandered off with him she looked back at us in a manner that promised it wasn’t for
long and that she was with us still in spirit. If I liked her I had therefore my good reason: it was many a day since a
pretty girl had had the air of taking me so much into account. Sometimes when they were so far away as not to disturb
us she read aloud a little to Mr. Archie. I don’t know where she got her books — I never provided them, and certainly
he didn’t. He was no reader and I fear he often dozed.